A Coat of Many Colors: Religion and Society along the Cape Fear River of North Carolina

Conclusion

289 Conclusion Conclusion In April 1760 the Reverend John McDowell described the Cape Fear region as “inhabited by many sorts of people, of various nations and different opinions, customs, and manners.” McDowell’s statement regarding the present could also serve as a prophecy of the Cape Fear’s future. At the end of the twentieth century the threads of Wilmington’s religious life extended to Bodh Gaya and Benares, Jerusalem and Mecca, Rome and Geneva, Moscow and Constantinople, Cahokia, Salt Lake City, Mount Athos, Westminster Abbey, and Ife in Yorubaland. Worship services took place in locales spanning the sensual banquet of sights, sounds, and smells in a Greek Orthodox church through the almost Cistercian austerity of a clapboard country church to the informal assemblies around coffee and cookies of covenant fellowships in domestic residences. And if buildings varied in their interior capacities, their exterior architectural lineages stretched through history to quote the Federal style of St. Martin’s-in-the Field, the Classicism of the Parthenon, the Gothic elements from Chartres Cathedral, and even the openplan modernism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.1 Religious pluralism, meaning not simply the tolerance of religious outsiders but also their participation in forming and implementing the agenda of society, is the object of much contemporary commentary. Who counts as an “outsider” is always relative to time and place, as this volume has shown. In any case, that Baptists and Buddhists could thrive together in Brunswick County, that the black pastor of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church could serve as the president 290 A Coat of Many Colors of the New Hanover Human Relations Commission, or that a Wilmington rabbi could be active in the New Hanover Ministerial Association is indicative of a new religious pluralism developing in the Cape Fear. Wilmington’s place on the map of contemporary southern religious life is instructive. Clearly, if “southern religion” means having mostly Baptists and Methodists and maybe a few Presbyterians thrown in for predestinarian spice, then Wilmington’s myriad religious population is striking and perhaps, for a city of its size, exceptional. As scholars examine the assortment within southern Protestantism, the variety within southern evangelicalism, and even the complexity of the contemporary religious life in a metropolis such as Atlanta, the religious diversity of the Cape Fear region is notable not only for its current reality but also, as McDowell indicated, for its historical precedent and continuing presence. Regional identity provides a matrix for understanding important aspects of American religious history. Pacific Slope, Upper Midwest, New England, and Great Basin are all areas, along with the South, that combine regional and religious attributes. Recognition of subregions, such as the Cape Fear, is important in mapping this new geography of American religion. While academic scholars, newspaper editors, and everyday folks debate the prospects of a pluralistic culture in America—some condemning it, and others praising it—it is clear that the genie of religious diversity is already out of the bottle, even in the South. Economically, the South is involved in the broad processes of globalization , not only in financial centers such as Charlotte or Atlanta but also in places such as Wilmington. The post–Civil War shipping of cotton and other materials by Alexander Sprunt and his son, James, directly from Wilmington to Europe was multiplied in the late twentieth century by the Port of Wilmington’s exports to Europe , Africa, South America, Asia, and the Mediterranean. Similarly, Wilmingtonians could purchase imports from these locales in venues ranging from boutique shops to franchise conglomerates. And just as Wilmington was part of an international economic network, so too did it display connections to the major religious traditions of the world. Thus, the blending of enduring traditions, such as Protestant evangelicalism, with emerging patterns, such as religious diversity, is the hallmark of the religious experience of the Cape Conclusion 291 Fear. Stitching together this “coat of many colors” has become the emblematic challenge of the present; in the Cape Fear region, it is also the legacy of the past. ...